kirabug's idea files

Day 45:

Today was clear, but humid. You know how it is after a rain storm, where the air hasn’t actually dried out even though all the water’s fallen out of the clouds? That was today all over. No matter where I went, everything felt wet, regardless of the blue skies and the sun.

I’m still finishing closing up that cave entrance in the back. It’s proving to be more difficult than I expected. I mean, I’m a miner, not a stonemason, though right now I’m wishing maybe I’d’ve gone into that instead of taking a twelve week course to “lose weight, gain valuable skills, and travel the galaxy”.

So yeah, rocks. Slippery when wet. Painful when dropped on hands. I’ve made some gloves out of leather, but they’re not exactly steel-reinforced crush-protection gloves, they’re more like don’t-scratch-your-hands-on-sharp-rocks gloves.

Then I realized that I was low on wood, and had to go cut a tree down, and by the time I was done breaking up the branches and cleaning that mess up,  the day was pretty much done.

I still wish I had a shower.

We have a big decontamination shower on the ship, in the high-gravity section. It had two jets from each of the walls, and nine jets total across the center. If you were put in the decontamination shower, it meant something went seriously wrong during the mission – exposure to radiation, biological hazards, something like that. I hated it. It was too much water too fast and it freaked me out. I only had to use it twice and I actually became kind of afraid of it.

Right now, I think it’s exactly what I’d need to feel clean again.

Day 44:

Oh cod I am covered in mud. So much mud.

The rain has been off and on. If I had any idea what the climate of this tiny planet was normally, I could say something pithy like “Ah, spring!” or “The rainy season needs to make up its mind!”

Instead I’m just covered in mud.

I finally mostly sealed the back cave that I found…what…weeks ago now? Yeah, back almost 20 days ago. It took a lot of my diorite to do it. (I don’t trust the normal bedrock in this place. The exploding giraffe corgis have been shown to turn it into rubble too quickly. So I’ve been stacking and chipping and polishing and using the pitch and tar that seeps into the bottom of my forge to seal the stone I’ve mined into a wall between me and the outside world.

Fortunately, the back cave is on the way to the mountain.

Unfortunately, the back cave’s entrance is, like, two yards maybe from a pretty sizable lake. And it’s raining. Not just like a spring rain on the vid channels where the couple falls in love and talk about their favorite perfumes, but a torrential downpour of giant drops and heavy wind. Which means waves. Which means lake water is just sloshing all over the place, over the banks of the lake, down the embankment into the cave entrance, and all over my nice shiny stone.

Everything is wet. Everything is muddy. Everything is slippery. I can’t even climb out that entrance because it’s a mudslide, and I don’t mean the alcoholic bit with the coffee flavoring.

I’m probably covered in cuts and bruises from all the falling down I did today but fortunately/unfortunately I can’t see any of it through the mud.

I’m afraid to sleep on my bed because I still only have one stinky sheep skin and I don’t much look forward to washing it to get the mud off. But I’m so tired…

Day 43:

Dug all day today, managed to not get covered in mud or lake or anything else gross.

Shoulder’s still sore. Writing hurts, sorry about the length of the entries.

I’m also trying to be extra quiet because, well, remember me saying the other day that the skeleton-like creatures seem to have disappeared?

There’s one outside my door right now, circling. Watching. Waiting. I don’t think it can see through the windows since i have the light extinguished and the starlight doesn’t penetrate to the bed here very well. But that also makes it a bit hard for me to write. Mercy knows if my handwriting will prove illegible, or the page crooked.

It doesn’t seem to be able to get into my fenced-in pen, which is good. And it doesn’t seem to be interested in the duckens or the cows or the horses, which is even better. But it certainly doesn’t like me.

I’m going to lay here and try to sleep and not freak out.

Day 42:

Sometimes you move one rock and everything comes tumbling down.

It’s probably a pretty good metaphor for my life since I landed on this dump, but at the same time it’s not a metaphor at all.

Since I’m mining without a compass or a map or for that matter anything else, I  managed to follow a vein in under the river.

You can see where this is going.

Anyway, I managed to get the holes sealed back up, but I’m soaked to the skin. I’m going to spend the night in front of a hot fire.

Day 41:

The top of my cave house is pretty well sealed against the wet. It’s taken me a while to accomplish that – stuffing pitch from the wood I’ve been burning into every crack I could find to seal the place up.

Below the main level, though, when it rains, things still get pretty wet.  The water seeps through the ground and turns the dust to mud and the stone into a slippery surface that even the best of boots struggle to maintain a grip on.

It rained all day today. I did my best to mine, but the risks are much higher than even The Company, with all their equipment, was generally willing to take on. We almost never dropped into a site if there was rain in the local forecast.

I remember the Captain complaining one time about the delay in starting a drop because of the rain, and Marvin just looked her and said, “How many bones do you want the doc to set?” and that was the end of that.

Tomorrow hopefully there will be less rain and more time to work my way closer to the mountain.